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Saturday, November 15, 2014

Unit Setup and Saving Start up file in Blender

Its been a long time since I have posted here. I was actually busy. But then I thought that humans are always busy so it will not be fair to not let other learn what you know. So Here I am continuing my post about Blender...
Now lets talk about setting units in blender. Setting units is very important when you are working on architectural projects or even its good habit so whenever you need to develop scene according to real life you have a real life measuring unit in blender.
Lets take an example where setting units can help you. Suppose you are making a scene where you have to build houses in a row on the bank of a river and there is a bridge to cross the river and peoples walking on bridge. Now in this situation either you will guess the width of river by making it then you will make bridge, you will make it according to the feel of your own when you think the bridge is looking ok then you will make humans walking on bridge and then you shall feel like either my bridge is too wide or my humans are small, and when you scale your humans then the side railing of bridge looks smaller than it should be. I am not saying it will always happen but it will happen often if you are not good at proportion and not have enough experience.
So setting units is good for anyone who wants no further scaling and adjusting the scene for proportion. After unit setting you know how much wide your river is, and how much long a human should be.
By default the unit is set to none in blender, or you can say its set to the blender units. So every time if you are making a scene you have to set unit first.
  • Note : Unit setting for a scene should be done just after creating a new scene before working any further, first you should setup your unit.
So to setup the unit, create the new scene, then go to the Scene tab(sphere cylinder light composed in one Icon) in Properties window then open the Unit section.
Unit setup in blender

Now there are options for Unit setup which I am explaining bellow, select the options according to your preference :
  • Metric : If you prefer to use kilometers, meter, centimeter type of scheme for measurement.
  • Imperial : If you prefer to use Ft, inch type of scheme for measurement
  • Degrees : self explanatory for rotation
  • Radians : Its used in many area of mathematics for measuring rotation. An arc of a circle with the same length as the radius of that circle corresponds to an angle of 1 radian.
1 Radian = 57.296 degrees 
You can use Radians for rotation if you prefer or needed.  
Maybe you don't want to setup unit every time after creating a scene and want it to already set at your preferred unit. To do this you need to save a startup file.A startup file is the file that opens by default when you launch Blender. By default it contains a cube, a camera and a light.
To save a startup file with your preferred unit setup, first create a new file then set the unit by the method I have explained above and then go to file menu and click on “Save startup file” or you can press ctrl+U to save startup file.If you don't want the cube to show up when you start the blender then you can delete the cube and save startup file.
Save Startup file in Blender

So this is all for now. If you have any question or anything just let me know in comment section. See you in the next post. Happy Blending...